Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
59 lines (39 loc) · 2.51 KB

libraries_in_contao_4.md

File metadata and controls

59 lines (39 loc) · 2.51 KB
Raw

Contao 4 - The way you should do it

Up to Contao 3 we had many PHP classes that have served us well over the years. However, most of them are with us for many years and thus do not follow lots of coding styles or principles that have been accepted by a broad part of the PHP community over the last few years.

To be a bit more precise:

  • Most of them do not support Dependency Injection
  • Most of them are tightly coupled to other Contao classes whether it's via inheritance or reference to other classes
  • None of them are unit tested
  • etc.

We have to move on - that's why there is Contao 4. Given the fact that we use Composer as our new dependency manager to load third party libraries, it will be very easy for any developer to use third party code within their extensions to Contao 4.

The Contao library

As of Contao 4, a lot of our libraries can still be used (making transition easier) but you should be using alternatives the PHP community offers you. Note: This does not mean there are alternatives for any library in Contao! You will need to figure out where you have to use Contao libraries and where you should switch to an alternative. E.g. very specific Contao functionality such as template rendering (class Template), DCA loading (class DcaLoader and DcaExtractor) or Controller methods will obviously not have any alternative within the PHP community.

Here are a few examples of how we used to do things in Contao 3.x (that still work) but can be improved by using more advanced libraries supporting lots of the modern coding principles.

The Request class

Contao 3:

$objRequest = new Request();
$objRequest->send('http://domain.tld');

if ($objRequest->hasError())
{
    // Error
}

$strResponse = $objRequest->response;

Contao 4 / PHP Standalone:

The two most used libraries within the PHP community for HTTP requests are probably Guzzle and Buzz. There may be other alternatives that you might consider using. Here's the same example for Guzzle:

use GuzzleHttp\Client;
use GuzzleHttp\Exception\BadResponseException;

$client   = new Client('http://domain.tld');

try {
    $response = $client->get('/');
    $response = $response->getBody();
} catch (BadResponseException $e) {
    // Error
}

The ZipWriter and ZipReader classes

Try checking out libraries that can handle even more formats than only .zip such as Zippy and friends.